Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Friday, November 21, 2008

Why Sean Gallagher is Boththe Opposite of Rick Peterson and Identical to Him

It's a standard of good coaching in and Beyond Baseball that to be a good
teacher, you have to be equally open to being a student to your students. Angus'
Twelfth Law: "Everyone knows some things you don't. Inevitably, a few of
those things will be both worth knowing and applicable later". If
you apply that in your management practice, you use almost every
coaching/training/mentoring act to try to pick up actionable tools from your
student/protege/team member.

I've written about that a bunch in the past, most pointedly back in
July of 2005 when I first spoke with Rick Peterson and he shared how he used
his early opportunities as the New York Mets' pitching coach to work with Pedro Martínez.
Essentially: To be a successful teacher, you have to be an attentive student.

But the Oakland Athletics' young starter Sean Gallagher (not this
one; this
one) has turned Peterson's process on it's head. To be a successful student,
it helps to be an attentive teacher.

Sean Gallagher isn't just one of the A's
best and quickest learners. He's also a pretty good teacher himself.

The rookie right-hander, who has applied
what he's recently been taught to excellent effect his past two starts,
spends much of the winter coaching kids in South Florida, and he loves it.

"Everything I've ever heard my coaches
say, all the little things, I find myself doing and saying those
things," Gallagher said with a laugh.

He'll have more tips to pass along this
offseason, because Gallagher, the main piece in the Rich Harden deal with the
Cubs in July, has been a real focus for pitching coach Curt Young and bullpen
coach Ron Romanick the past month.

Gallagher didn't always do this. His coaching was triggered by a specific
request.

That endeavor started out of the blue.
Gallagher was working out at a fitness center where former big-leaguer Bruce
Aven was giving hitting lessons, and according to Gallagher, "One day,
Bruce looked at me and said, 'I wish I knew something about pitching, but I
don't know the little things. What do you think about pitching lessons?'

"I said, 'Why not?' And it just blew
up. I was booked from 2-9 pm, all ages from 10 to 20 year-olds, and a range
of talent. It's crazy, there's a 12-year-kid who throws as hard as some of
us. This sport, I love it so much, and if anything were to happen to my
career, I'd love to stay in the game as a coach."

That's going to keep Gallagher fresh. The analysis he'll require to break
down the pieces and re-assemble them, the need to communicate with different
people differently, will both serve him well in learning from others, being more
sensitive to the nuances of the communication he requires for both kinds of
relationships.

A client I worked with last year has a manager who is pretty saturated, in
the sense that while he doesn't resist learning, he's had to learn so many new
things over the last couple of years, he's pretty exhausted, more ready to apply
recently-gained knowledge than to buckle down and learn more. At the same time,
though, he takes his responsibilities to train his staff very seriously.

Technically, the last couple of systems and practices we needed him to learn
were things only he needed to know. But while he was trying to learn them, he
couldn't get enough steam to keep them internalized. He just kept forgetting the
details of what he was trying to learn..

So even though it wasn't essential for his staff to master those things, it
was marginally useful (redundant abilities) and it gave him a reason to learn.
I can relate to this personally. As an example, I can produce useful code about
as fast as I can type in five programming languages or scripting schemes. So
when a customer wants help from me in another language in which I'm not
currently adept, I quietly roll my eyes. If I have to learn from textbooks or
on-line training, I usually suffer mightily -- I'm not primarily a coder
anymore, and frankly, I'm very pragmatic about what I learn -- if it's not
something I can apply, or just downright fascinating (and Yet Another Coding
Language doesn't qualify) my energy is lower. Give me an actual problem that
needs solving, I can do it pretty easily, though. So I ask for a real life
application for some code on which to learn.

The next best approach for me is to take responsibility for training people
in what I need to learn. The act gives me plenty of additional incentive to
learn, and the act of training brings to the surface additional questions and
others' insights that usually accelerate my own learning.

SMASHING WATERMELONS
As it turns out, Sean Gallagher is one of those Lifelong
Learners.

Former Cubs teammate Scott Eyre, now with
the Phillies, is so close to Gallagher that they jokingly call each other
"dad" and "son," and they took an RV trip from Florida to
Arizona for spring training this year. So Eyre can testify to how interested
Gallagher is in everything around him.

"I know Sean likes teaching - that's
the kind of guy he is, because he likes to learn, too," Eyre said.
"I remember him going up to Mariano Rivera and saying, 'How do you throw
that cutter like that?' That's a rarity. He has a very high drive and he
learned a lot from the rest of the rotation, like Ted Lilly. He retains
information really well and he asks questions."

Out of sheer curiosity, Gallagher went to a
massage therapy seminar one offseason, and, he said, "I learned a lot
about muscle actions, injuries. I like to pick people's brains." {SNIP}

"Coming up, he was so energetic, he
kind of rubbed some guys the wrong way," Eyre said. "He's so
happy-go-lucky it was like, 'Why isn't this guy more nervous?' "

What it boils down to is that Gallagher is
overjoyed to be in the big leagues. It's all he's ever wanted to do, and he
didn't think he had a shot until his talent began to emerge his junior year
at St. Thomas Aquinas. There's a reason he's constantly grinning, and it's
something he always shares with the kids he coaches.

The human energy that we exchange when we're actively teaching or learning is
something that the environment can amplify or enervate.

If you have someone on staff who needs to learn something but isn't having a
lot of success, they may succeed if, like my client's manager, they can apply
the target knowledge as teachings for others.

And, if like Sean Gallagher, they are already having success, it might just
amplify that success.